In Memoriam: Sally Menke

Quentin Tarantino and editor Sally Menke at the Beverly Hilton Hotel, February 18, 2007. Photo by Kevin Winter/Getty Images. As most film enthusiasts undoubtedly know by now, Oscar-nominated editor Sally Menke was found dead in Los Angeles’s sprawling Griffith Park yesterday, after going for a hike Monday at the height of the city’s record-breaking heat wave. Although Menke’s passing is foremost a tragedy for her family and loved ones, it is also an incomparable loss for cinema. She cut for directors such as Oliver Stone (Heaven and Earth) and Billy Bob Thornton (All the Pretty Horses), and every child of the 90s owes her an infinite debt for giving Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles the pacing necessary to harness their deficit-starved attentions. However, Menke will be remembered most vividly for her unusually intimate collaboration with Quentin Tarantino. Having cut every single one of the auteur-savant’s films, Menke established a partnership with Tarantino that will go down as one of the great editor-director combinations in American cinema, taking its place beside those of Steven Spielberg and Michael Kahn, and Martin Scorsese and Thelma Schoonmaker. Tarantino fans will undoubtedly feel that painful loss when they are exposed to a film not edited by Menke, and that loss will serve as a reminder that editors are the great unsung heroes of all our favorite films.According to the New York Times Arts Beat blog, Tarantino has freely admitted that editing with Menke was like working with a writing partner, and no doubt the director’s trademark ability to hold and savor the tension of a beat well past the point when other directors would have moved on—or keep an audience riveted by his free-form pop soliloquies—flowed from Menke’s artful cutting. How else could he have gotten away with an opening scene in Inglorious Basterds that occupies practically a whole film reel? Or danced delightfully around the meandering diner conversation that sets up Reservoir Dogs? Or found such depth of feeling in Robert Forster’s stoic, steady smile in Jackie Brown? Arguably, Samuel L. Jackson owes much of his reputation and his career to Menke’s judicious close-up choices in Pulp Fiction. In all these cases, she knew the delicate art of the invisible cut that masters like Walter Murch tell us is one of the sweetest spots to hit for an editor. Yet, she also knew how to magnify the cinematic feeling, when to go in for the close up, which undoubtedly helped Tarantino create his incomparable style. One wonders if all the countless Tarantino imitators out there wouldn’t seem so pale if they had Menke at their side.

It’s easy to forget an editor when we wax rhapsodic about a director’s framing, a cinematographer’s lighting, or an actor’s performance. However, every casual student of the medium knows you could make no bigger mistake. In a great editor’s hands, all these elements are merely the marble from which a masterpiece must be uncovered. The true alchemy of film, the dream-like nature that helps us sit still for 100 minutes or more, seems to flow like magic from the space between a cut. Although they work in solitude, in a dark room far away from the convivial atmosphere of the movie set, editors are often the true maestros/workhorses leading audiences through at just the right pace, finding small emotions on actor’s faces, and building dramatic meaning where there was none before. Is it any surprise that one of the greatest directors of all time, David Lean, started out as an editor? Often you will find that the most film-knowledgeable member of a crew, aside from the director, is the editor. (She will also know all the best places to order in.)

It seems impossible to overstate Menke’s loss for any fan of Tarantino’s work. To crib from his infamous invocation of Ezekiel 25:17, she was the good shepherd leading us through the valley of film. In her white-gloved hands, we moviegoers feared no evil.